CAIRO — New cracks emerged in the government of President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt on Sunday over his decree claiming power beyond the review of any court in the country, which has been met with loud protests.

While Morsi defended his decree and insisted that it was only temporary, his justice minister began arguing publicly for a retreat that might defuse an escalating battle between Egypt’s new Islamist leaders and the institutions of its old secular-authoritarian government.

The justice minister, Ahmed Mekki, is an influential former leader of the movement for judicial independence under Hosni Mubarak and is now one of Morsi’s closest advisers. He told two television talk shows late Saturday night that he objected to the scope of the president’s decree, which his opponents say could be a first step toward a new Islamist autocracy.

Morsi’s office has said the decree was needed to protect the democratically chosen constituent assembly that is trying to write a new Egyptian constitution from Mubarak-appointed judges who appeared poised to dissolve it. Mekki said he supported that goal but that the president could accomplish it with a much narrower edict — one that did not assert sweeping immunity from judicial review on other matters, the feature of the decree Morsi issued Thursday that has prompted the loudest protests.

Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president and a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, now faces a test of his ability and willingness to engage in the kind of compromise that democratic government requires. But he also faces real doubts about the willingness of his secular-minded opponents to join him in compromise.

Each side is mired in suspicion of the other, a legacy of the decades when the Brotherhood survived here only as an insular secret society, demonized as dangerous radicals by most of the Egyptian elite.

“There is a deep mistrust,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo who studies the Brotherhood.

“It is an ugly round of partisan politics,” he said, “a bone-crushing phase.”

Some conflicting signals emerged Sunday from people close to the president, while street protests continued in Cairo and Egypt’s stock market fell sharply, driven by investors’ concerns about increased instability.

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